In a typical cellular system, several large cells cover a single city. A wireless system on a smaller scale is a microcellular system. A microcellular system typically covers the area of a large cell and each cell has a radius of 100-300 meters in an outdoor or indoor installation. Picocellular systems are still smaller in scale and cover a radius of up to 60 meters extending the coverage to places where micro sites are impractical.
One type of picocellular system is an indoor, wireless communication system, such as wireless office system (WOS) or a picocell extension to the public land mobile network (PLMN). The picocellular system is divided into physically distributed regions within the indoor environment providing an air interface between mobile terminals and radio heads. The radio heads are typically cascaded in a “daisy chain” fashion to a control radio interface. The control radio interface is typically connected to the PSTN by pulse code modulation (PCM) line, a communication link such as a T1 or E1 line.
In a typical indoor, wireless communication system, most telecommunication services have substantially the same channel structure, for example, each radio head has access to a plurality of channels, or timeslots, on the communication link. The radio head includes transceivers configured to handle a multitude of system functions, such as control channels, verification devices, voice channels (analog and digital), and packet data. During operation, a transceiver occupies a certain number of channels in order to handle its system functions. The introduction of more powerful and complex services requires the allocation of a variable number of channels for different radio heads. Appropriate channel allocation methods are desirable for efficiently allocating resources without blocking.